Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

My people and I have come to an agreement that satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

Envy is the basis of democracy.